A draft of the downtown strategic vision plan could be finalized and made public within the next month.

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During his report to commissioners at the Oct. 20 Redevelopment Agency meeting, Redevelopment Director Robert Landolfi said a draft of the Central Business District vision plan by Heyer, Gruel & Associates (HGA) has been received.

“The way I’ve done these kinds of things in the past, everyone takes a look, marks up their draft, and we’ll get together and have a conversation,” Landolfi said during a telephone interview on Thursday. “Sometimes consultants come back and say here’s the reason we didn’t do it that way. At end of the day, you work through it.”

A meeting is scheduled on Wednesday with HGA, according to Landolfi. There’s been limited distribution of the draft until it’s finalized, which could be within a month, at which point it will be publicly released.

In June, City Council awarded a $63,000 contract to the Bank-based consultants to develop a downtown strategic visioning plan. Part of the process included a survey of stakeholders about the present and future of downtown that closed Sept. 10. Landolfi estimated the survey portion of the vision plan received some 500 to 600 responses.

The strategic vision plan is about setting the next stage of redevelopment. “Where we’re at now, we attracted a lot of good residential units that have spurred some other economic development growth downtown,” Landolfi said. “The mission now is to identify what those next steps are, and to completing and supplementing that vision, defining what the new vision should be and go about implementing it,” he said.

For example, Landolfi said city officials know that infill is needed, downtown is not connected and there are pockets of underused and vacant properties. There’s also a need for daytime uses to draw daytime foot traffic. “We need some amenities downtown that need to be attracted; where do they go, what are they, how do you attract them?”

The vision plan will Identify and market strengths. “All of that, big portions of that would be included in that plan,” Landolfi said. “There needs to be not just a comprehensive approach but there needs to be synergy and commonness of purpose and goals” between entities like the Redevelopment Agency, City Council and Special Improvement District. “At the end of the day, you end up identifying those things that need to be done and pull resources between those entities and figure out how to get them done,” he said.

“It’s important that you define what you want, what you wanna get out of it, and how you go about implementing that,” Landolfi said. That wasn’t being done. As opposed to having an overall plan to guide development, development was done almost standalone unto itself.”

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